Wednesday, August 23, 2017

If you follow US politics and the 2016 General Election campaign for the US Presidency, you are aware of Katrina Pierson (from the Trump campaign).

Pierson has a recent history of Tea Party leaders in her home state of Texas. She also has a more distant background which includes the use of crack cocaine. Substance abuse which led to an arrest at a Dallas, Texas department store (reported with her young son in tow). Despite the period of time which has passed since 1997, there seems to be an issue of cognitive deficiencies; in many cases, such mental issues never move to a point of rational.

After a long period of no Pierson on cable news coverage, she has reappeared. Trump's over-the-top mishandling of the Charlottesville, Virginia Nazi/white supremacist rally (and associated violence) has offered an opportunity for incessant cable news segments. The lack of a presidential reaction to the violence including Trump's sickening efforts to offer a moral equivalency to Nazis and white supremacists and anti-Nazi rally protesters provide a platform for Fox News regurgitating Pierson for its ravenous tin head viewers. Pierson performed well while offering a point of view which may permeate through the minds of many conservatives who have the mental capacity to hold that thought. Pierson has no such impulse reactions.

As the on camera discussion moved through issues of Charlottesville and discussion of removing public symbols of the US Confederacy to museums Pierson went here:

“The only place that that's being done right now is by ISIS and I really don't think that you should have leaders actually encouraging people to do these types of things,” she continued, “because Americans actually love their history, their culture, good and bad, because it helps them learn and it helps keep people educated about why America is so great to begin with.”

“It absolutely deserves a place, because bad history is still good history for this country.”

The comment drew this startled response from Osefo:“Slavery is good history?”

What you witnessed is not only the essence of a person who lives in an alternate universe, you heard a person who will say anything for a dollar, and you caught a glimpse of the core of millions who consider themselves conservatives.

If you are involved to think in terms of we shouldn't use Pierson as a beacon of the inner core of million on the Right, how about another example. Let's move to another region of North Carolina. In early 2016, a candidate for the Alamance County Board of Commissioners, candidate Tim Sutton spoke of a non-apology for his family's history of slave ownership while avoiding the use of the word slaves. He referred to human bondage and human chattel as "workers."

Commissioner Tim Sutton — who ran for his seat as a Republican in 2016, Times News reported — said he would never vote to remove Confederate statues, which have become a topic of debate at the local and national level after a recent white nationalist protest against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“If it comes down, it goes back up. To heck with facts,” Sutton said, after other county commissioners responded to the request from the Alamance County Taking Back Alamance County (ACTBAC) group. “The emotions have just gone haywire. I am not going to be a victim of political correctness. I am just not going to do it. Label me all you want, say what you will about me.”

He went on to say he wasn’t ashamed by his great-grandfather for doing “what he did” because the “workers” — whom he apparently wouldn’t call slaves — on his family farm were given land.

“It is my understanding that when (my great-grandfather) died, from Sarah, my grandmother, that some guys on the farm, you can call them slaves if you want to, but I would just call them workers, that they raised a good bit of my family,” he said, according to Times News.

“When the time came, my great-grandmother gave them land. I am not going to be an assault on logic, an assault on the history of this country and the heritage of this area and this country. Not going to do it,” he said.

If American conservatives reflect on one of the most horrific aspects of US History (only surpassed by the wanton genocide of Native Original North American people in the millions), is there any wonder we have such deep divides regarding what seems a key facet of Rightwing ideology.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Yesterday we published a piece about the incompetent state of Donald Trump's top national spokesperson. Katrina Pierson ineptly followed the obvious strategic response to Trump's horrific attacks on a "gold star" family who's son died in Iraq. The strategy, deflect any and all opportunities to answer questions about Trump's disgusting attack with rhetoric about President Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Why do Trump and his circus show surrogates play us so cheaply? The answer is simple: the campaign is shallow and their candidate is void of substance. Moreover, Trump seems to have only employed a handful of qualified political campaign professionals; and he doesn't listen to any advice or counsel from those hires. Competent political operatives would have developed a far more effective response to the political feces left by their out of control boss. Trump shallowness breeds public shallowness and embarrassing situations. Blaming Obama and Clinton is as shallow as a sidewalk tadpole pool.

The blame Obama and Clinton strategblew upup in the face of Pierson while responding to a battery of questions from CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Herewith is the piece published yesterday: When Trump Surrogate National.spokesperson drowns in that tadpole pool.

After the Wolf Blitzer segment, he returned from commercial break and immediately address the fallacy of Pierson's remarks. Actually, Blitzer should have been adroit and informed enough to have performed an instant correction. But, that would remind of a reach back to times when television news was actually delivered by journalists. Without question, Blitzer received the correction via his production team and probably was ordered to offer the correction. Of course, you knew CNN wouldn't allow Blitzer's post commercial correction to pass.

Pierson's need to speak about her incompetent statement, CNN's thrill for "exposure news", and the possible need for CNN's management to address the issue after its previous airing, led to an on-camera segment this morning.

The video above leaves the message we wanted to impart via this piece. We will remind you that Trump will take people such as Peirson into the Whtie House should he win the general election this fall. Incompetent from the top down is unacceptable such incomeptence in the White House is a nation killer.

You know the story of Mr. Khan and the story of his father and mo0ther since the Democratic Party Convention. We won't spend minutes on video patriarch Khan's initial convention speech and the many subsequent appearances on every cable network in America. In some cases, he has appeared on multiple days with increasingly dire messages regarding Donald Trump. All video is readily locatable via a simple Google search.

The purpose of this piece is to highlight the utter ridiculousness of the Trump campaign. Well, you say we do that rather consistently of late. Of course, but today we are going to focus on the campaign's flagship cable news talking head (predominate a CNN booking talking head): Katrina Pierson. We are focusing on Pierson because she seems to embody the most incompetent of all Trump campaign staff.

Pierson's background is that of a Texas Tea Party operative who obviously also has a reputation of "running her mouth." She also has a background in the archives of the Texas criminal system for (1997). Shoplifting while accompanied by her young son. Thus, judgment was, and is not, a trait that we can comfortably assign to Pierson. Moreover, her penchant for literally spewing random inane and incoherent statements shines another light on Trump's chief national spokesperson.

As a spokesperson person fails miserably. Granted, Pierson operates well within the campaigns and the GOP behind the scenes strategies in working to recover every verbal ball Trump dumps on his supporters. Yet, she often also fails to fully understand the intricacies and nuances imbued in (daily) "circle the wagons around Trump" strategies. Example. It is obvious to any who follows news or current events must now know the GOP/RNC and Trump campaign had decided to respond to any questions about the Khan family with deflective remarks about President Obama and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Strategy is strategy and it is critical to any political campaign. We should wonder why the campaign would advance a motor-mouth campaign spokesperson who doesn't understand the deep basis for the strategy?

If the strategy is to blame Obama and Clinton for the Kahn family death while serving our nation, failing to loop timing into the strategy is only possible via the less competent of surrogates. Pierson is certainly a less competent national campaign spokesperson.

On CNN's The Situation Room, Wolf Blitzer seemed to question Pierson into a confused knot and yes, her incompetence and a lack of knowledge failed in closing the surrogate loop. She flat out stated the Obama's and Hillary Clinton "rules of engagement" changes led to the death of Captain Khan. Problem? Well, watch the segment and then I will share the problem if you do not already recognize her inept surrogacy.

https://youtu.be/VAtxCRfU1g0\
“But surely you can understand the confusion, considering how Donald Trump never voted for the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton did,” Pierson said. “Then she didn’t support the troops to have what they need. It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagements that probably cost his life! So I don’t understand why it’s so hard to understand why Donald Trump was confused.”

There is a very obvious problem with this, of course: Khan was killed by a car bomb all the way back in 2004. During that time, Clinton was a senator for New York and Obama wasn’t even a senator yet.

The brief bio at the top of this pages lists Captain Khan death as having taken place in 2004. If you are into there yet, I ask you to think about when Senator Barack Obama won election as the nation's 44th President and when he appointed Hillary Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. Does the year 2008 and 2009 come to mind?

Monday, March 28, 2016

Donald Trumps campaign surrogates, campaign staff and various and asunder pundits (probably paid off the record...(eg., Roger Stone like characters) are noted for their edginess and questionable civility in on-camera interviews. One such talking head actually wore a bullet shell necklace during a CNN segment with abortion as a central discussion point.

We recently experienced a CNN segment in which the show host, Don Lemon, cut the mic on another Trump talking-head as she attempted to strategically avoid a question.

Where doesTrump find such people and on what basis are they hired and allowed to represent him on international television shows?

Yet a Trump campaign official has a history of showing the most 'edge' during television interviews: Stephen Miller. The following words oozed from Miller's mouth on an Easter Sunday segment.

“You want to talk about women’s issues? Here’s something we should be talking about,” said Stephen Miller. “It is a fact: As a result of uncontrolled migration into this country – you can look this up, it’s a statistic from Equality Now – half a million U.S. girls in this country are at risk of female genital mutilation.”

After the segment embed, we will share the basis of Miller's lie.

If you find Miller's performance on yesterday anything shy of disgusting, check out the source information from which Miller drew his lie.

According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report (January 2016), half a million women and girls in the U.S. are at risk because they were born in countries in which female mutilation cultural tradition or the immigrant has parents who were born in those countries.

We offer an excerpt from a piece posted by the Population Bureau Reference.

The Risk of FGM/C in the United States

In 2013, there were up to 507,000 U.S. women and girls who had undergone FGM/C or were at risk of the procedure, according to PRB's data analysis. This figure is more than twice the number of women and girls estimated to be at risk in 2000 (228,000).4 The rapid increase in women and girls at risk reflects an increase in immigration to the United States, rather than an increase in the share of women and girls at risk of being cut. The estimated U.S. population at risk of FGM/C is calculated by applying country- and age-specific FGM/C prevalence rates to the number of U.S. women and girls with ties to those countries. A detailed description of PRB's methods to estimate women and girls at risk of FGM/C is available.

Just three sending countries—Egypt, Ethiopia, and Somalia—accounted for 55 percent of all U.S. women and girls at risk in 2013 (see Table 1)

It goes without saying, Miller's campaign punditry was not based on a detailed read of the CDC report. I suspect he probably garnered his Easter ammo from a Washington Examiner publication detailed Easter Sunday morning. The problem with such lies, conservatives do not dig for information. Miller knows, as does he boss know, what they say is considered gospel by those who support them. They also know Americans tend to fold-up their intellect when peppered with the propaganda of fear.Miller typically Trumperized punditry didn't stop at female mutilation. How about his take on the Cruz Trump national campaign of wife background and associated slander?Mediaite excerpt

Stephen Miller voiced objections to the media getting so worked up about this instead of immigration, but Jake Tapper pointed out, “Mr. Trump is the one who has set this table.”

Miller complained about how D.C. “works itself up into a feigned indignation” over this, but Tapper jumped in to say he doesn’t think “anybody’s feigning anything.”

Former GOP official Doug Heye pounced and expressed some disgust with Miller’s recent CNN interview where––as Heye put it––Miller wanted to “agree to disagree on sexism.” Miller blew up and started shouting, “That is absolutely inappropriate!… You misquoted me, that’s a lie!”

Friday, January 29, 2016

It is refreshing to know there is, at least, one noted GOP pundit who finds Donald Trump's behavior far from the level of maturity necessary to serve in the White Hosue. Ben Ferguson appeared in a CNN segment with the notorious far-right windbag from Texas: Katrina Pierson.

We have posted many pieces on the background and character of Katrina Pierson, so we will not revisit the past. We will point out the following image from a Raw Story piece that shows a surrogate/spokesperson for a national presidential aspirant who would wear a bullet cartridge necklace on national television. And, she would do such during periods of mass shootings and abundant gun related killings. While a paid surrogate Pierson's character again shone through via efforts to Gish Gallop tight news time constraints with Trumpite garbage about running a business.

It is important to remember, key surrogates are given top spots in the White House (in some capacity). Yet, another reason to scrutinize Trump with far greater detail.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

In early December, we posted a piece that included an interchange between two conservative talking heads (SE CUPP and Katrina Pierson) SE CUPP Vs. Katrina Pierson (Texas Tea Party operative with ahistory of a brush with the law)., The callousness and flippant demeanor of the bi-racial tea party talking head is both shameful and indicative of what I perceive as the typical Trump supporter.

Katrina Pierson, the national spokeswoman for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, collected at least $11,000 in unemployment benefits while she was still working.

Pierson received these benefits from the Texas Workforce Commission between January 2012 and November 2013. At the same time she received this government money, Pierson was working as a consultant for Ted Cruz’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Receiving unemployment benefits while she was still working would seem to go against the grain of the message being pushed by Trump and the Republican Party, who have often been quick to blame minorities and immigrants for being on the government dole, supposedly taking up resources that should be going to white Americans (in reality, whites are the most likely to receive welfare benefits).

The spokeswoman, who recently made news in a CNN appearance where she wore a necklace made out of bullets and promised to wear one stylized like fetuses after gun violence prevention advocates called her out, also had an arrest for shoplifting. She stole clothing from a JC Penney store in Plano, Texas. She had her child with her.

Pierson made her name as a Tea Party organizer and spokesperson in Texas, working in the era after President Obama’s first election to push a conservative message across the state.

As part of that work, Pierson pushed the “Agenda 21” conspiracy, which claims that American lives are under threat from a sinister United Nations plot.

Under the UN’s aegis, she told the frightened crowd, Americans would be forced into crowded apartment buildings, and UN-empowered block captains would be “given police power over your neighborhoods.”

She appeared on Fox News, often to comment on racial issues from the perspective of a black conservative – something that is always in strong demand at the conservative news network – and once argued in favor of companies profiting off of the Martin Luther King federal holiday.

Pierson then tried her hand at electoral politics, mounting a primary challenge to Republican Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX). She wasendorsed by conservative figures like Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin and Joe The Plumber, and even had Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, on the campaign trail with her.

That campaign was a failure, and she lost to him 63 percent to 36 percent, despite his connection to criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

After those failures, Pierson went to work for the Tea Party Leadership Fund, described in some news reports as a “scam PAC” for its practice of scaring conservative voters into donating money which then is heavily spent on administrative costs for the PAC and its top tier employees. One source told Politico that Pierson’s affiliation with that sort of money operation disqualified her from affiliating with the Ted Cruz presidential campaign. Too unethical for Ted Cruz, apparently.

Pierson again became a fixture on Fox News and other cable news networks, eventually finding an extremely prominent role as one of the faces of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

In that role she has advocated for Trump using nuclear weapons as president, while downplaying abuse and discrimination against Muslims.

Politico also reports that Pierson has plans for a clothing and fashion line, but it is unclear if she will pursue that venture while also riding the Trump gravy train.

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